The Making of 'The Modern British City'
In this blogpost the authors of forthcoming book The Modern British City 1945-2000 reflect on what it means to grapple with the notion of a 'modern' city, how the book project came together, and how it was conceived as following in the footsteps of historical precedents in surveying British cities...
In 1973 a massive two-volume study, The Victorian City, was published. Edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, the book was a monument to two new subjects, Urban History and Victorian Studies. Appropriately, Dyos was Britain’s first Professor of Urban History at Leicester University while Wolff, an English scholar at Indiana University in the States, was a founder of the journal Victorian Studies. The Victorian City brought together an unusual array of scholars from different disciplines: art, architectural and social historians, literary scholars, sociologists and urbanists, among them Raphael Samuel, Sir John Summerson, Martha Vicinus and Asa Briggs. Its 37 chapters offered not so much a narrative history of British urbanisation across the nineteenth century as a panorama of Victorian sites and themes, from pubs to churches, the architecture of the sublime to demography and the ‘contagion of numbers’.
In envisaging The Modern British City we were directly inspired by its Victorian predecessor. Our book is dedicated to H.J. Dyos and borrows titles for its sub-sections from the earlier work – ‘Ideas in the Air’, ‘People on the Ground’. We wanted to reflect a similar thematic eclecticism, allowing a portrait of modern British cities to emerge from the 27 case-studies. We also wanted to give voice to the recent efflorescence of scholarship by a young generation of historians for whom researching cities has been an important way of rethinking questions about the cultures and politics of later twentieth-century Britain, from social democracy to social identity. So where The Victorian City explored slums and railways, Irish communities and prostitution, The Modern British City highlights gentrification and homelessness, gay villages and racialised zones, consumerism and industrial decay. As editors we encouraged contributors to avoid ‘surveys of the field’ and concentrate instead on essays that say something fresh and distinctive about modern urban experience in later 20th century Britain. In the spirit of Dyos and Wolff we invited them to produce contributions that are enjoyable to read and engaging to a wider audience than the merely academic.
Newham in July 1969, the view from the nineteenth floor of a tower block in Canning Town. Photo by Jim Gray/Keystone/Getty Images
What the ‘modern’ in the title might mean was not wholly clear before we started. Obviously, it denoted the period since 1945 but what became plain as the project took shape was how powerfully in Britain the urban ‘modern’ was forged in relation – and often opposition – to the Victorian past. For more than two decades after the Second World War politicians, architects and urban planners saw themselves as combatting the problems bequeathed by the Victorian city in the form of overcrowded slums, industrial dereliction and the evils of laissez-faire development. What ‘modern’ meant in this sense was the obverse of the Victorian city – urban spaces that were light, airy, above all planned. Paradoxically, from the 1960s Victorian buildings and streetscapes would undergo a volte-face in public estimation, becoming first the preferred housing of gentrifiers and the object of the conservation movement and, later, flagships of the ‘urban renaissance’ in cities like Glasgow and Newcastle. Modern British cities were made not simply in reaction to the Victorian inheritance but in a continuous dialogue with it.
Maryculter Shopping Arcade, David Gosling. Image courtesy of Gordon Cullen Estate/University of Westminster Archive
As with Victorian Cities, our contributors are international, from North America and Europe as well as Britain. They include different species of historian: architectural, cultural, film, intellectual, social, urban. A number have been associated with the SPUD network – the Society for the Promotion of Urban Discussion, run by Otto Saumarez Smith and Simon Gunn – which has served as a focus for the recent upsurge of historical interest in the British urban experience. Each chapter contains unique insights into the changing environment and experience of UK cities in the second half of the twentieth century, whether it be queuing in Belfast during the Troubles or designing Maryculter, a new town near Aberdeen planned in response to the discovery of North Sea oil. An Introduction and Afterword provide the larger historical context within which the individual case-studies are situated. Together they identify the long-term processes, like deindustrialisation and eclipse of empire, that shaped what happened on the ground and outline a new chronology of urban development over the whole period from 1945 to the 2000s. Our purpose in The Modern British City is not merely to describe urban change but to explain why British cities, in all their extraordinary multifariousness, look and feel the way they do today.
~ Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith, August 2025
Pre-order your copy of the book, publishing 28th November 2025
